Personal digital content collections are growing at a phenomenal rate, with individuals compiling large collections of digital photographs and videos. Naturally, there is also a desire to display and share these photo and video collections by printing collections of images, creating digital “slide shows”, and so on.
Computer software is currently available for arranging images, such as photographs, video frames, and blocks of text, on a page. Such software develops what are often called photo albums, comprising one or more pages with images selected by the user and arranged in various manners. A photo album page, as the term is used herein, refers to a page of fixed size having multiple images positioned thereon. A page may be a printed page, or a representation of a page, such as on a computer screen, television or projection screen.
Most conventional approaches to photo album layout rely on templates as a means for distributing images on the page. However, the number of possible form factors of printable content is increasing (e.g., panoramas, cropped photos, videos with varying numbers of keyframes). As this trend continues, it becomes difficult to provide sets of templates that adequately provide for all possible combinations of differently-shaped images and for all possible user preferences regarding the arrangement of images on the page. For example, on a single page, a user may desire to incorporate images which include individual photographs, blocks of text, and a sequence of keyframes from a video. The user may desire that one or more of the images have a fixed size, or that one or more of the images have a variable size, or both. The user may want to specify that adjacent images are separated by exactly a specified distance.
Currently available automated software lays out individual images independently, without any means for specifying that a particular subset of images should be positioned together in a cohesive group. This is unsatisfactory for many applications, such as for laying out keyframe images from a video. It is important that keyframes are arranged in a cohesive and ordered format (such as in rows and/or columns), because the keyframes include a temporal component that conveys action in the video.
Further, currently available automated software provides no means for the user to explicitly specify how far apart neighboring images should be. By providing explicit control over how images are spaced, layouts have a more polished, professional appearance and greater graphic design flexibility. For example, frames and corner decorations can be inserted around photographic images, and fixed-area “clip art” that reinforce a theme (e.g., a birthday, a holiday, a vacation, or so on), can be included without these embellishments overlapping or visually interfering with other images.
It is therefore desirable to provide a method for placing images on a page efficiently with a maximum variety of layout possibilities, while at the same time specifying that a particular subset of images should be positioned together in a cohesive group and/or specifying exact spacing between adjacent images.